by Paula Byrne
‘Something’s happened?’ said Kick.
‘Why don’t you go talk to Daddy?’
They walked back to the Waldorf in silence. Eunice had been told by her father that Billy was dead. When they arrived at the hotel, Kick was taken into her father’s suite, where he broke the news. She returned to the Plaza and stayed in her room by herself until evening, when she arrived downstairs for dinner, red-eyed. That evening at supper, nobody talked about Billy’s death. They acted as though nothing had happened. After some time, Joe asked Kick if she would like to have a friend with her. ‘Patsy White,’ she replied. Joe didn’t like Patsy, or her brother John, Kick’s former Washington boyfriend, but he put in the call at midnight and said: ‘I hate your guts, as you well know. But I have a favor of you. Will you come and stay with Kathleen.’1
Patsy came the next day, but was first taken to see Joe at the Waldorf to be briefed. When she finally got to Kick at the Plaza, she found ‘a great cloud of misery was hanging over everything’.2 She was desperate to be alone with Kick, and when she finally got the time she asked her friend what she had been doing since she heard the news: ‘Mostly going to Mass. Mother keeps saying: “God doesn’t give us a cross heavier than we can bear.”’ They talked for hours. Kick told Patsy that her only regret was not being pregnant with Billy’s child. She wanted something of him. Kick told her: ‘The amazing thing was that Billy loved me so much, Patsy. I felt needed. I felt I could make him happy.’3 Patsy, looking at Kick’s deathly pale face and ringed eyes, asked her if they’d given her anything to sleep. She took out some sleeping pills and gave them to her friend. Patsy told her that Kennedys don’t cry. She was shocked that everyone was carrying on as normal. Kick spent most of her time staring at a photograph of Billy.4
Letters and telegrams poured in. The President sent a telegram: ‘Please tell Kathleen I am thinking of her in her crushing sorrow. Mrs. Roosevelt joins me in heartfelt sympathy.’5 The most poignant letter was from the Duchess, written just four days after Billy’s death:
I want you never, never to forget what complete happiness you gave him. All your life you must think that you brought complete happiness to one person. He wrote that to me when he went to the front. I want you to know this for I know what great conscientious struggles you went through before you married Billy, but I know that it will be a source of infinite consolation to you now that you decided as you did. All your life I shall love you – not only for yourself but that you gave such perfect happiness to my son whom I loved above anything in the world.6
The Duchess, thinking only of Kick in her sorrow and not of herself, concluded: ‘May you be given the strength to carry you through these truly terrible months. My heart breaks when I think of how much you have gone through in your young life.’
That night Jack stayed awake with Kick while she talked about Billy. He later said that it was the worst night of his life.7 It was so tragic that she had lost Billy so close to the end of the war, when she had allowed herself to believe that he would come through. Her only comfort was that she had defied her family and sacrificed her religion to make him happy, and it had been worth it. Her family had been wrong, and she had been vindicated.
Kick called Richard Wood’s father, Lord Halifax, at the British Embassy. He told her that the War Office in London had confirmed the bad news: ‘She seemed very good and brave on the telephone . . . She is going up to Quebec tomorrow to fly home . . . It is a melancholy business.’8 He had arranged to get her without delay on to a top-secret flight back to England.
From Quebec she wrote to her parents: ‘We depart tonight some time – I am so glad to be going.’ She told her parents that losing Billy felt very different from losing Joe: ‘When a brother dies, a sister is very sad but she doesn’t get the gnawing pain which one gets when one loses a part of oneself – that was Joe to you both – And Billy to me.’ Heartbreakingly, she told her mother: ‘Remember I told you that he got much holier after we were married. Now he is the one to bring me closer to God – what a funny world.’ She wanted the family to know how much she had loved Billy, and how happy she had been: ‘I don’t mind feeling sad cause why should I mind. If Eunice, Pat & Jean marry nice guys for fifty years they’ll be lucky if they have five weeks like I did.’9
Before heading for the airport she had got out the diary inscribed ‘This Book is the PRIVATE PROPERTY of Billy & Kick’ and written:
September 20th 1944
So ends the story of Billy and Kick. Yesterday the final word came. I can’t believe that the one thing that I felt might happen should have happened. Billy is dead – killed in action in France Sept 10th. Life is so cruel. I am on my way to England. Writing is impossible.10
Since Billy’s battalion had moved on after the battle of Heppen, his body had been recovered by a following unit. This led to the assumption, in the casualty report to the War Office, reiterated in the telegram to next of kin and the official records, that he had died on 10 September. But the battalion diary and the recollection of Frans Mangelschots reveal that he was actually killed the day before.11
On the special flight from Quebec, Kick found herself in the illustrious company of Britain’s top brass, the Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Charles Portal, and Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, returning from an Allied conference. Each was accompanied by two aides-de-camp. She observed that ‘They all kept opening up important looking boxes and rushing around always clutching a very, very secret looking brief case.’12 She was treated royally, and given champagne and a meal of soup, meat and vegetables and ice cream. Her sense of humour never left her. Three days later, back in England, she wrote, ‘I must say the last thing I thought I’d be doing last week at this time was watching the Chief of the Air Staff and the Chief of the Imperial Staff drinking champagne in the mid-Atlantic.’13
Throughout the flight she put on a brave face. She was shown round the cockpit, ‘watching the landings and takings-off, which was terribly exciting and Portal took great pleasure in showing me everything about an airplane’. For official purposes, they pretended that she was a nurse. Charles Portal chatted to her for much of the flight and told her that if at any time she wanted air passage he would arrange it on her behalf. On landing in Plymouth, the group were taken from the plane and whisked into a private train with luncheon served on board.
The Duke of Devonshire met her at the station in London and took her down to Compton Place on the south coast. Elizabeth and Anne Cavendish and Debo were there: ‘they are all wonderfully brave. What you and mother went through has only now just been brought home to me as I feel such a funny pain and that must just be what you had.’14
Being back in England was a double-edged sword for Kick. She desperately wanted to mourn Billy among people who knew and loved him, and yet the memories of him were ever present and she suffered deeply: ‘The realization of Billy’s death has come to me very acutely here and I should probably have spared myself a great deal of agony if I had remained in America,’ she told her family. She recognized, however, that she needed to be with her in-laws: ‘I am so terribly pleased that I came and the Duke and Duchess were so glad and I couldn’t have borne not being able to talk to them all about Billy.’15 The Duke, shattered by Billy’s death, was impressed by Kick’s fortitude and selflessness. He finally saw what Billy had seen all along.
Tributes poured in and the Cavendish family devoured them all, trying to piece together the very last moments of Billy’s life, taking comfort from the wonderful words that were written about him. ‘The letters about him’, declared Kick, ‘have been perfectly wonderful . . . saying how well he had done during the whole course of the summer.’16 They learnt that he would certainly have won the DSO (Distinguished Service Order) had he not been killed. Letters were read and re-read and passed around, as if they could somehow bring Billy back from the dead. The Duke received a letter saying how furious Billy’s men had been when they heard the news about their commanding office
r. ‘We took no prisoners that day,’ one of his friends later wrote to the Duke.17 A twenty-five-year-old corporal from Essex was so incensed by Billy’s death that he killed forty-five men in one hour: ‘so the death of Lord Hartington was avenged’.18 Another comrade wrote to Kick to tell her that Billy was ‘brave and fearless . . . just and fair’ and ‘admired and respected by all whom he commanded’. He told Kick that he could still hear Billy shouting ‘Sergeant Major’. He was full of energy, ‘a real live wire’. He and Billy had spent hours talking in the slit trenches and Billy had spoken endlessly about wanting a career in politics and his desire to be an MP. He told Kick that he had helped to bury Billy.19
Another soldier, James Willoughby, wrote to the Duchess to say that he had visited Billy’s grave by a little chapel in Heppen: ‘He lies with five other guardsmen and the local people have made it all very beautiful with flowers and a private hedge.’ He added, ‘I am thankful, too, that he lived to see the welcome we received all the way across France and Belgium for the look of happiness in the people’s faces made us all realize that almost any sacrifice is worth while.’20
Kick was keen that her family should recognize Billy’s courage. She faithfully copied out paragraphs commending his courage from friends who had written letters to her and to the Duke and Duchess. She asked her parents to show the passages to ‘all the brothers and sisters. Since they didn’t know Billy very well they might like to know how well he did.’21 Praise for Billy even came from the unlikely source of one of Britain’s leading left-wing academics: ‘Prof Harold Laski has written the most wonderful impression of Joe as he taught Joe for a year at the London University. In the letter he sent me he said “I met your husband often and on each occasion I thought he combined charm with integrity in an exceptional degree.” That’s praise indeed coming from one of England’s most rabid Socialists, don’t you think?’22
But Jack was the one who truly understood. He sent the Duchess a beautiful condolence letter, comparing Billy with his own hero, Raymond Asquith, who had faced death so bravely in the trenches of the Somme. Billy’s death, he wrote:
was about the saddest I have ever had. I have always been so fond of Kick that I couldn’t help but feel some of her great sorrow. Her great happiness when she came home which even shone through her sadness over Joe’s death was so manifest and so infectious that it did much to ease the grief of our mother and father. It was so obvious what he meant to Kick and what a really wonderful fellow he must have been that we all became devoted to him, and now know what a really great loss his is. When I read Captain Waterhouse’s letter about the cool and gallant way Billy died [the tribute in The Times describing Major Hartington’s bravery at Beverlo and Heppen], I couldn’t help but think of what John Buchan had written about Raymond Asquith ‘Our roll of honour is long, but it holds no nobler figure. He will stand to those of us who are left as an incarnation of the spirit of the land he loved . . . He loved his youth, and his youth has become eternal. Debonair and brilliant and brave, he is now part of that immortal England which knows not weariness or defeat.’ I think those words could be so well applied to Billy. I feel extremely proud that he was my sister’s husband.23
A service was going to be held for Billy at Chatsworth, which Kick worried would make her feel so ‘very sad’. She told her parents that everything in England reminded her of her husband: ‘I just feel terribly, terribly sad.’ She acknowledged her father’s belief that she and Billy might have had future difficulties as a result of the religious difference: ‘That’s all quite true, but it doesn’t fill the gap that I now feel in my life. Before it had its purpose, I knew what it would be. Now I feel like a small cork that is tossing around.’24
Kick had also received a letter from Bishop Mathew telling her that she was able to receive Holy Communion. Since Billy was dead, she was no longer living in a state of sin. She was gratified that he now spoke sympathetically of her decision to marry Billy: ‘I have always been convinced that the reason why you took the line you did about the marriage was because you wanted your husband to be happy in what might prove the last portion of a small life.’ ‘Isn’t that nice,’ Kick wrote to her family. She was also having a mass said for Billy and Joe ‘at which I shall receive Communion. I hope that makes Mother as happy as it makes me.’25 Rose was indeed delighted that she had her daughter back in the fold, though she told Kick that she had been so exhausted that she had spent a night with the nuns at Noroton. She also told her that she had been to mass frequently, to say prayers for Billy’s soul: ‘After I heard you talk about him and I began to hear about his likes and dislikes, his ideas and ideals, I realized what a wonderful man he was and what happiness would have been yours had God willed that you spent your life with him.’ In Rose’s mind, it was not God’s will that Billy should survive and stay married to her daughter. ‘A first love – a young love – is so wonderful, my dear Kathleen, but, my dearest daughter, I feel we must dry our tears as best we can and bow our head to God’s wisdom and goodness. We must place our hand in his and trust Him.’26
Joe wrote to Billy’s parents, sympathizing with them as one who had lost a beloved eldest son himself. Whenever he talked about the war and his losses, he always included mention of his son-in-law, whom he never really knew. He was upset when he visited the President in October and the President got Billy’s name wrong.27 He wrote to Lord Beaverbrook, ‘I have had rather a bad dose – Joe dead, Billy Hartington dead, my son in the Naval Hospital.’28
He knew that Kick was suffering badly: ‘She is frightfully courageous but I think deep in her heart, completely inconsolable.’ But Joe could not and would not change his views about the war. He refused to believe that ‘the death of the two boys’ had any positive effect. His friend Arthur Houghton lost his son in May 1945 and Kennedy wrote: ‘I don’t think you ever get over the shock . . . I won’t offer you that hocus-pocus that some people offer – that he died for a great cause – I don’t believe he did. I believe he died like young Joe as a result of the stupidity of our generation.’29
This was a view that Kick did not and would not understand. She had to believe that Billy had died for a cause that he believed in. Jack knew this. She told him that it would be ‘a long time before I get reconciled inside . . . little things happen every day that make me think “what would Billy have thought of that”’. The ‘pattern of life for me has been destroyed. At the moment I don’t fit into any design.’30
But now she had to make decisions about her future without Billy. She had not given Chatsworth an heir, and Debo was now the Marchioness of Hartington. Kick was given a small inheritance and was able to retain the title of ‘Lady Hartington’. Debo came to stay to help her through her grief. She was saddened to see her bubbly sister-in-law so changed. Kick refused to sleep alone, so a family member slept in the same room. Younger sister-in-law Elizabeth Cavendish felt ‘she had never met anyone so desperately unhappy’.31
Kick spent Christmas 1944 quietly with the Duke and Duchess. Then in January she went to a Sacred Heart convent near Kendal in the Lake District for a retreat. She had been staying with Sissy Gore, who now had two small children. Kick said other people’s children made her feel sad, as she would have loved to have some of her own. It was freezing at the Convent, but the nuns were charming, kind and solicitous. Kick was still traumatized, and she was glad that she had made the retreat: ‘it still somehow doesn’t seem right. Rather like an awful dream.’ Here at the Convent, she didn’t have to worry about being courageous or thinking of others. She could give in to her grief for all that she had lost. There had been moments of anger towards God – ‘I guess God has taken care of the matter in his own way, hasn’t he,’ she had written to a friend32 – but now a process of spiritual healing began. One of the nuns wrote to Rose after Kick’s visit, describing her as ‘the sweetest, most simple, unspoilt child you could wish to find . . . she is looking very well . . . quite lovely – her great innocent eyes, and very sweet face makes one long to ha
ve her portrait painted. The grace of God is shining from her face.’ The nun was convinced that sorrow over Billy’s death had not turned her away from God. Kick, she said, was a ‘really holy girl, a deep thinker’. She was coming to the realization that her life was ‘not over, or spoilt, or wrecked, but beginning anew’.33
The retreat was an important turning point. Kick was in two minds about her future. Her friends and the Duke and Duchess were begging her to stay in England. When she returned from Kendal, she concurred that for now England was her home. She moved into a flat in a building called Westminster Gardens in Marsham Street with Billy’s aunt Anne Hunloke. She loved the flat, which was ‘furnished quite simply, but very cosy’. The sitting room had an open fire and there was a small dining room. Her linen and silver were from Chatsworth. She liked her cook: ‘I have completely destroyed all her illusions about Marchionesses, slouching around in overalls or stark naked.’34
She returned to the Red Cross. True to Kennedy form, she wanted to keep herself busy. Her job was to arrange hospitality in English homes for GIs and she also worked with wounded soldiers. She still cycled to work every day, as in the old days before she married Billy.
Kick was being mothered by the Duchess and by Marie Bruce. She also had a new maternal figure, Lady Anderson, whose younger brother had been in Billy’s battalion. Ava Anderson was married to Sir John Anderson (after whom the Anderson shelter was named), Home Secretary and Minister of Home Security, then Lord President of the Council, in the war cabinet. Billy had been extremely kind to Ava’s brother after he was wounded and Lady Anderson was repaying him by taking an interest in his beautiful young widow. ‘Please don’t worry about me,’ Kick told her family, ‘because I am well taken care of and Billy always seems quite near.’ She told them that ‘with the passage of time I miss Billy more but feel the sense of loss less. Rather difficult to explain.’35
